It was me and simply inexperience as I've only been playing minecraft for just over a week. Never any lag when I was on with all my stuff running for a hours and hours, so it could easily have been the water as that's the only thing that 'changed' from my previous quarry setups? I just used 2 water sources instead of 1. The quarry itself was keeping the same number of chunks loaded as the default sized one (2 chunks kept loaded as per the message.) It was my first time trying out markers and doing an 18x9 quarry instead of a 9x9.

Had set the water source at the beginning of each quarry (Have done over a dozen now) based on advice on how to set up automatic quarries from forums and other TOG players so I 'thought' I was doing it correctly and safely.

Lesson learnt and I deeply apologise for impacting on the time for all those involved who had to go in there and break the break (as it were.) Can't have been easy avoiding monsters while at it.

For what it's worth for others, it doesn't appear too heavy handed an approach but I have to inspect everything to find out for sure

As Sorontar said, I posted in general because we had PMed the person involved - so this post was not to do with them - but we wanted to try and make people aware of the fact that stuff left going can cause lag.

Quote:

It was me and simply inexperience as I've only been playing minecraft for just over a week.

Thank you OJ It's just one of those things, and hopefully we can work out what went wrong and stop it happening again (for anyone)

Quote:

Never any lag when I was on with all my stuff running for a hours and hours, so it could easily have been the water as that's the only thing that 'changed' from my previous quarry setups?

Apparently it was fine earlier in the evening (I think someone said you were last on 7pm?) - so whatever it was, seems to have happened somewhere around 8-9pm.

Quote:

Can we get some info on exactly what was wrong other than the quarry or is it hard to pinpoint? I mean if it's for example a case of pipe overflowing or such, then there are steps the rest of us can take to prevent that from happening in our own bases.

The problem is - we don't really know for sure what caused it. I don't think you can quite appreciate the situation.

Whilst in the lag zone, I had 1 frame every 5 seconds! Some were luckier with slightly better than that. Movement at all was *****incredibly****** difficult.

When we discovered the problem we had to get into the area (far more difficult than it sounds) which involved holding down the forward key and waiting while you laggily inched forward. It took probably at least half an hour just to walk into the effected area from where the lag started (lag started as soon as the chunk loaded in view). Even with all the graphics and render distance set low.

Then we had to try to get into the place and try to see what the problem was, and what we could do to fix it. But given it was difficult to even look around (you had to guess how far to move your mouse then wait a few seconds to see if you've looked in the direction you planned to, or if you went too far and turned yourself around), and difficult to move around - we had to just do our best to look around and try to shut off what we could, hoping it would eventually reduce the lag. We were not able to stand around discussing the merits of design or anything - we needed to do whatever we could to try and get the server back, and we needed to do it as quickly as we could - so other players wouldn't get stuck.

Even with restarting the server a few times, and logging in/out to gain a few extra seconds of movement before getting locked up again... it took hours just to move around.

Because of the lag, the "clean up crew" were put into creative mode - partially so no harm came to us - but also to prevent harm to any buildings (though the entire server was so laggy at that point, the mobs were themselves barely moving). We ended up having to remove switches rather than turn them off - because the lag made switching them very difficult.

It was seriously an horrific situation.

The water from the quarry was the most obvious - as it was flowing from above ground level down to bedrock, and a lot of running water can cause lag. But it's unlikely that it alone was the cause of the problem, as normally that amount of water would not cause such game-breaking lag. It probably was just the "straw that broke the camel's back" so to speak.

There was 1 source block a few blocks up from the remaining "pool" of water, which we managed to remove, but then it seemed the "pool" (which was floating up in the air) was comprised of a few source blocks. So we had to try and stop those, to let the water drain down. It may have been the lag causing it, we don't know, but as the water dropped, it seemed it was creating new source blocks as it dropped. So we kept having to remove those to get the water to drain. Once we'd gone down a good way - the lag improved slightly and the water started to drain properly. As it drained, the lag eased and once the water was gone, the lag vanished also.

I believe someone else noticed a lot of blocks lying around - presumably dropped from overflowing pipes or something - which was thought to also contribute to lag. (It was impossible to do anything about picking those up and doing anything with them, but they would have disappeared eventually - reducing any lag they caused) Someone else mentioned that there was automatic sorting happening, which is believed to also cause some lag.

What ultimately caused it - we don't know. It was probably just a combination of things..

Quote:

2) Does stationary water have the same impact, say, if I mined a 64x64 quarry then filled it to the top of stationary water? (NOT flowing water).

Definitely not, because stationary water at the top becomes falling water in all blocks below it :P (unless you actually filled every single block from bedrock to ground level with water, which would be insane and take forever)

Water itself shouldn't be too much of an issue, but water in addition to other lag-inducing things, probably is.

What's interesting is that the clients had low framerates. If the problem was for example something incredibly CPU intensive server side (such as perhaps flowing water or sorting) I don't think the clients would behave the way they did. In that case you would have quite responsive clients but a very laggy environment where everything takes long time to complete.

From this I would rather conclude that it's something related to graphics or world simulation client-side. You mentioned a lot of blocks lying around, and I've read that that can be a source of severe lag (probably also related to that possible lag from crystal chests). So as you moved around and picked up stacks the lag should diminish.

The easiest way to avoid this is to make sure all automatic sorting is handled in such a way that overflows can be handled reliably and preferrably routed to a void pipe or recycling machines.
A tip here is that a diamond pipe next to a chest will deposit all filtered items into that chest as long as there is room, but once it's full the items will continue down the line (into any unfiltered direction that is available from the diamond pipe) without dropping. I use this mechanic in my sorting system (you're welcome to check the second and third underground levels of my base to see it in action if you don't get my explanation).

What's interesting is that the clients had low framerates. If the problem was for example something incredibly CPU intensive server side (such as perhaps flowing water or sorting) I don't think the clients would behave the way they did. In that case you would have quite responsive clients but a very laggy environment where everything takes long time to complete.

I don't know what was going on.... the clients were laggy - It took me several minutes to get into the options menu to turn all my graphics settings down to minimal.... which I found really surprising.

But the environment was definitely laggy.... That's why the water took such a long time to clear - because it was only dropping one block every few seconds. If that lag was just client based, we'd have seen it drop dramatically each frame we saw, and if we logged out and back in again, it would have dropped since we were on last. But it wasn't.

I tried to connect MiniObsi's account on my other PC, to have someone in a non-lag zone in case we needed to tp someone out of the lag zone - but even though she was not in the lag zone, and was moving freely, her client ended up crashing out with some sort of lack of memory error (and she's been on the server before without that happening)

It first started when Bazz joined the server (in his lot, which is in the same area) and instantly everyone on the server had huge lag. I was miles away (at the sand village) and the mobs around me weren't moving at all. Zombies standing in full sunlight burning, but not moving was my first clue something was wrong - because I was able to walk around fine - it didn't seem laggy other than the mobs not moving. Then it had been sunrise, and it was bouncing back to night and forward to sunrise again. I think Admiral commented that all his machines stopped working. Then I tried to mine something and basically nothing happened. We thought the server needed restarting but as soon as Bazz left the server, it went back to normal. So we figured it was something to do with him.

He came back on and managed to get out of the lag zone and wasn't laggy any more - so then we figured it must be the area, not him..... so then I used the myst books to travel to that area, was instantly lagged when I got there and had to get teleported out. We weren't sure if it was Bazz's place or OJ's, but we worked that out by walking there from spawn and from T0ur0k's place (south?) to work out where the lag started. Going from spawn - both places loaded at once and it lagged. Coming from the other way Bazz's place loaded fine, but once OJ's place started to load, it lagged.

But then for a while I was standing at spawn without OJ's place in my view distance, with the 3 others online all within the lag zone, and I was able to move around fine with no lag - but the environment was laggy - mobs were not moving, the sunrise was bouncing and those players in the lag zone were all moving around laggy.

So it seemed that while someone was in the laggy chunks, the whole server experienced lag - though perhaps not to the same degree as those in the laggy chunk.

Mystcraft also has other abilities. Primarily, it can create new dimensions/worlds/ages, sometimes to design, sometimes randomly. One such world is that to which the Myst portal at spawn travels, which is referred to in the first link above.

I am sure many of you would love to go creating and exploring new worlds. However, each new world adds to the load of our servers, and depending on how you create them, they may never be able to be revisited again. While it might seem like fun, for a community server, it isn't. We want any world that is created to be used by all. We also don't want to have to save too many worlds.

Therefore, we ask that if you wish to do more than just use the already established portal system in Mystcraft, please tell the Admin team.[1] Do not create new MystCraft worlds yourself without permission. We have been liaising with people like Irimar who know more about Mystcraft than we do.

Enjoy

Sorontar

[1] i.e. we don't mind people establishing new book portals to link between the existing main Mystcraft world and Overworld locations or the Link Modifier idea.